Amidst the avalanche of GeForce RTX 50 Series leaks, an alleged new feature has caught my eye: neural rendering. Mention of it comes from Inno3D‘s now-amended CES 2025 press release, wherein the company described it as a means of “revolutionising how graphics are processed and displayed.” These are lofty claims, sadly devoid of detail, but Nvidia has made use of similar terms elsewhere. So, what exactly could it be?
Nvidia’s research subdomain features several articles associated with a neural rendering tag. Sifting through the selection, ‘Real-Time Neural Appearance Models‘ seems like the most likely fit. Buckle up, as things are about to get as technical as they are potentially exciting.
Earlier this year at SIGGRAPH 2024, Nvidia shared its ambitions to improve the quality of real-time rendering to the point of becoming almost indistinguishable from pre-rendered assets. The company states this is possible through the use of neural networks, replacing traditional shading graphs that are simply too complex for a graphics card to handle in just a few milliseconds.
Watching the comparisons between neural and reference materials in the video above, it’s admittedly extremely difficult for my eye to pick out any major differences between the two. Exploring the image viewer on the research subdomain proves similarly impressive. Of course, Nvidia has cherry-picked these examples and I’m keen to see what this technology can do outside of the company’s labs. More specifically, let’s see how game developers can use it.
Nvidia makes an explicit reference to gaming in its presentation, highlighting the increased level of detail neural rendering can offer players. However, I hope that this comes part and parcel with some measures to reduce the storage footprint of high-resolution textures.
Given the relative recency and sizeable detail of ‘Real-Time Neural Appearance Models’ compared to other articles in the research subdomain, it seems like the most likely candidate for GeForce RTX 50 Series’ neural rendering features. Combining the above with DLSS Super Resolution, Frame Generation, and Ray Reconstruction would only serve to further cement Nvidia’s position as a leader in AI rendering.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently claimed that artificial intelligence paves the way for “some kind of hyper Moore’s Law curve”, swapping transistor counts as the measuring stick for AI computing performance. In the same podcast, he highlights the importance of codesign between software and hardware. It’s difficult to argue against his perspective, one I happen to agree with, but I can only hope this path towards ever-higher performance via deep learning doesn’t end by way of Icarus.
Huang will provide the final word on GeForce RTX 50 Series and its features, neural rendering or otherwise, come the company’s CES 2025 keynote, on January 7, 2025 at 2:30AM (GMT). Club386 will have boots on the ground come the day, so be sure to check back for any and all announcements.
